The 9/11 Conspiracy Hoax

The purpose of this page is to show why the only 9/11 conspiracy
that ever existed was Al-Qaeda's. Click or scroll
down for specific rebuttals. Go to the bottom
for physics questions to ask the conspiracy folks,
if you want to see them squirm.

First of all, conspiracy theories are all wrong.
Americans are taught from an early age to be nice and especially not to
commit murder. Some people miss this teaching, or think it doesn't apply
to them, but those people get involved in crime at an early age and never
amount to much. They never, ever rise to positions of great wealth and
power as described by the 9/11 Conspiracy (C911) theory. They do not get
elected to President unless large numbers of honest citizens believe they
are electing honest leaders. Another large number of honest people -- the
ones who voted for the opposing candidates -- would dearly love to find
proof that the eventual winners are in fact not honest and good leaders,
but however hard they tried, they did not succeed. That is an important
and significant result.

C911 is nothing more than a blatant attempt to demonize President Bush.
Half of the people in this country hate Bush, and they will stop at nothing
to discredit him. The other half hated his predecessor, with similar efforts
at discreditation. Last year the Bush-haters fabricated a "global warming"
crisis to beat up on Bush. They could have complained about the much more
immediate HIV crisis, but Bush happens to be doing very good things in
that arena. It turns out that the Bush policy on global warming is also
about the best that can be done, as the European Union is now discovering,
so the Bush-haters have mostly left off complaining about that.

Some people probably don't care about 9/11 as much as they would have
you believe, but C911 is a source of income for them. Look at their web
sites, they are offering their information at a price: buy this report
($10), or subscribe ($55/year) to that service. They want your money, and
if you are gullible enough to believe their fabrication, this is a way
to get it.

What about the physics? Don't ask the C911 team, they are not qualified
to answer that question.

Jeff King, one of their outspoken authorities, makes himself out to
be an "MIT engineer"
on their web site, but if you look around, you discover that he got
a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT in the 1970s,
and is currently
in the medical business. He is neither professionally nor academically
qualified to comment on the physical properties nor chemical structure
of concrete.

William Rodriguez is a janitor quoted on the
existence of a bomb
in the basement of the tower where he worked. He tells us about "two
explosions", the first coming from the elevator shaft before the
plane hit the tower. He was not outside where he could actually see the
plane hit the tower, he just heard two sounds, the first travelling at
the speed of sound through the hollow elevator shaft (followed by a blast
of burning jet fuel), and the second travelling more slowly through the
structure of the tower, both from the same impact a quarter-mile away,
but travelling at different speeds through different materials. Rodriguez
is a janitor, not a physicist, and he does not understand these things.
Nobody outside heard two explosions.

I'm not a physicist nor structural engineer either, but I'm not asking
you to believe anything. Check it out yourself. Ask somebody who is qualified.
Or just do the math. The C911 fabrication doesn't
add up.

10,000 gallons of burning jet fuel, they tell us, is not enough energy
to weaken the tower structure, there must have been thermite. Do the math:
Wikipedia
gives the thermal energy in thermite as "851.5 kJ/mol"; one mole is 159
grams of iron oxide, plus 53 grams of aluminum, total weight about a half
pound. Elsewhere we find "There
is approximately 45,000,000 Joules per litre of Kerosene," slightly
less than 200 million Joules per gallon, which is 100 times the energy
in a pound of thermite. If 10,000 gallons of jet fuel are insufficient
to the task, then surely the same energy in a million pounds of thermite
is also inadequate, right? How are they going to get a million pounds of
any incendiary or explosive up that tower unseen? Where are they going
to hide it? And that's not enough to do the job! Do the math.

You can tell you have a hidden agenda when the evidence they bring out
to support their position is self-contradictory. The C911 story is particularly
bad. They say it was not an airliner that hit the Pentagon, but they don't
tell you what happened to that plane if it didn't. People
were on that jet, people with real names and real families; where are
they? Ask U.S.Solicitor General Theodore Olson what happened to his wife
Barbara. Ask John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society,
what happened to Joe Ferguson, director of their geography education outreach
program, along with three teachers and three students on an educational
trip to the Channel Islands in California sponsored by the Society. If
there was no plane, why are we told that Cheney
knew about it when it was 50 miles out? If there was no plane, how
could he know about it?

Sure, there are problems and minor discrepancies in the official 9/11
story, but none as bad as the problems and fabrications in the C911 story.
In one case I know personally the guy responsible for the posting. He carefully
and repeatedly refused to give me any indication that he had actually looked
at anything on the subject other than the prepackaged C911 videos. It's
like he's afraid if he looked at all the evidence, he'd have to give up
either his fetish or his integrity. By refusing to look, he can pretend
to be honest. Three months later, after he finally succumbed to my insistence
that he look at something other than the C911 propaganda, he backed off
considerably.

If there really was a conspiracy, the C911 people have an obligation
to give us a credible scenario how it could have
happened. Slandering the integrity of a few government officials or wealthy
property owners does not count as a complete story, they need to tell us
how much explosives were used, and how they got into place. Exact figures
of the minimum quantities needed, not some vague theory about 23 hours
when the power was down. Who is going to take these explosives up the tower
when the elevators are shut down? How many people will it take to walk
a million pounds of explosive up the stairs for 88 floors in less than
23 hours? Why are these people willing to do something so nefarious as
planting bombs in an occupied office building? For the money? Who is going
to pay them enough to overcome their natural disinclination to murder 3000
people? Developer Larry Silverstein had to share his $2B insurance settlement
with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and he has a huge obligation
to rebuild the towers that he lost ($1.3B just to rebuild WTC7, the smallest
of the three); there's not much money left for paying off clandestine laborers.
Besides,
Silverstein is supporting
Democrats for public office; why would he want to join some Republican
warmongering conspiracy (assuming that's what it is)?

Specific Rebuttals

It doesn't take many of these to realize that the C911 fabrication just
doesn't hold water. Here are some of the more obvious problems in the C911
story. I will add to this list as needed...

Concrete pulverized into dust

Jeff King, who is not a chemical engineer, wants you to believe that there
was insufficient energy in the collapse to pulverize the concrete. If,
as they tell us, the towers fell at "near free-fall speed" then after ten
seconds the final velocity was over 200mph. Bringing a 100,000 tons of
steel and concrete to a dead stop from 200mph has plenty of energy to pulverize
whatever concrete was left when it got to the bottom, as well as melt the
steel. Much of the dust was formed during the collapse: the energy to overcome
the strength of the steel framework would have plenty left over to pulverize
the concrete. The C911 folks agree with me there, but there's more they
are not telling you.

Concrete consists of crushed rock glued together by calcium silicate
in its hydrous state, essentially the same thing as limestone. In its anhydrous
state, cement has no strength. Concrete is manufactured by heating limestone
to drive off the water, and it is used ("set") by adding that water back
in. Fireplaces are made of brick or tile, because concrete loses its strength
when heated. Here you have 10,000 gallons of burning jet fuel heating up
two or three tower floors to the point where they no longer can support
the weight on them. So they collapse straight down to the next floor. One
undamaged concrete floor might hold the weight of another landing softly
on it, but this was rather sudden, a dead stop of all that concrete falling
from ten feet above. Sledge hammers falling from six feet break concrete;
this is a whole floor falling ten feet. If the first floor to crumble and
fall was above (heat rises!) another heated and rapidly disintegrating
floor, then the combined weight of two floors will hit the next one; even
if its concrete is undamaged, the weight of the load suddenly stopping
on it will break it. From there on down, there's only more weight, moving
ever faster. The steel crossbeams can't even hold that, so pretty soon
the whole structure is on its way down. The floor collapse happens before
the steel core gives way, before the exterior sheath sees any stress, so
you can expect popping sounds and dust plumes to preceed the visible structure
collapse.

Tall objects topple

Tall, slender objects only topple over when their rigidity is uniform and
exceeds the lateral force applied. The WTC towers were not uniform. The
vertical beams were much thicker at the bottom than they were at the top,
as admitted on the C911 sites. The lateral force of the jet planes hitting
the towers was not enough to cause them to topple; otherwise they would
have fallen over immediately. The impact of the planes destroyed some of
the steel supports at the point of impact, but the structure survived the
impact, as it was designed to do. The remaining steel beams continued to
support the weight of the upper floors. The steel was also strong enough
to retain its strength in the case of an office fire, giving the fire time
to burn itself out. But this was no office fire, it was 10,000 gallons
of
burning jet fuel. That's enough energy to carry a jet plane all the way
across the country. The heat from the fire damaged both the concrete (reducing
it to its powdery anhydrous state) and caused the steel to soften and/or
buckle, thus adding to the load on the remaining beams beyond their rated
capacity. The force of the load was straight down, so that's the direction
it fell when they gave way. This happens in milliseconds, much faster than
the time it would take for the torque of the uneven load to convert the
fall into a tipping motion of a mass as large as the remaining undamaged
stories above.

I wrote
the previous two paragraphs before I ever saw any video footage from 9/11
(I do not have a TV). That last sentence was a guess on my part based on
the C911 claims. On further reflection, it seemed to me that the south
tower, which the plane hit one corner rather than square on as in the north
tower, should have shown some tipping in that direction as it started to
collapse. I was utterly astonished to watch the C911 video of the collapse
showing the south tower tipping exactly as I expected -- even while the
voice-over was claiming it fell straight down. The C911 propaganda is a
pack of lies. The north tower fell straight down; the south tower started
to collapse in the direction of the weakened corner, but once the whole
floor gave way, the additional energy of the collapse was distributed uniformly
over the whole floor, and the rest of the fall was straight down. The north
tower, without the differential stress imparting a tipping force, took
longer for the fires to weaken its structure enough to precipitate the
collapse. I searched and found the image on the right, evidently a snapshot
from the video, on a site whose text denied the evidence plain in the image
he posted. Lu Xinzheng, an engineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing,
has done computer
simulation; his results match the actual collapse, which he noted results
entirely from the structural properties of the steel and the fire (he goes
on to identify design changes that could mitigate the collapse).

Steel melts at 2800F, jet fuel burns at 1700F

True, but the steel
does not need to melt into liquid to lose its structural strength.
That happens at temperatures close to the ignition temperature of jet fuel,
which is much lower than its normal burning temperature. Once the concrete
has begun to collapse, the impact of the falling weight of the floors
hitting the next floor down will generate a tremendous heat; the whole
mass of steel and concrete moving in excess of 100mph and coming to a dead
stop at the bottom will have enough energy to melt large quantities of
anything.

The C911 folks consistently use worst-case scenarios to make their case
look better. The fact is, you don't need to heat up the whole floor to
get collapse, you only need to degrade the carrying capacity of enough
of it to exceed the rated load on the rest of the floor. That could be
several orders of magnitude less than the numbers the C911 folks bandy
about. Don't take their word for it, do the math yourself.

Thermate residue

It is claimed that "Professor Steven Jones" ran electron microscope analysis
of steel spheres from WTC site to prove thermate was used. Steven Jones'
credentials are not given, but if he is qualified to run this kind of analysis,
he is lying about the results. An electron microscope can tell you about
the crystalline structure of a material, but not its chemical composition;
one uses chemical methods (taught as "quantitative analysis" in college)
or a mass spectrometer for that. He claims to have found sulphur in these
globules. That's very interesting, because only a very small amount of
sulphur is used in military grade thermate. According to Wikipedia,
Thermate-TH3 has only 2% sulphur, but 29% barium nitrate. Jones said
nothing at all about the barium content of these globules. The function
of sulphur in thermate is to lower the inignition temperature; the sulphur
itself burns off in the form of sulphur dioxide (a gas commonly used in
curing dried fruit, and which combines readily with water to form battery
acid). Lots of things -- even the human body -- have enough sulphur to
make up a detectable residue in some of the meltdown products. Furthermore,
even if enough thermate were used to actually bring down the towers --
itself beyond credulity, given the amount needed and the fact that nobody
noticed -- the chance of finding identifiable and distinctive traces of
it in millions of tons of rubble is exceedingly small.

One of the C911 folks has actually done some
of the math on thermite. He was looking at where it could be hidden
(the physical size of the incendiary needed), but in the process he showed
that 762.5kg of thermite would be needed to melt one 12ft high steel column
(actually, just a 1-foot section of it, which would be sufficient). That's
3/4 of a ton for each column on each floor, over 35 tons per floor!
3000 tons is an awful lot of contraban to sneak past every-day workers
on site. At market
prices, it would run into millions of dollars just for the thermite,
not counting the labor to install it. It also does not explain why the
alleged demolition conspirators started their destruction on the 88th floor,
rather than at the top. In a private email the
author responded to my critique, but inadequately.

WTC7

Many C911 folks seem to think the collapse of WTC7 somehow proves their
conspiracy. They don't seem to be listening to Irwin
Cantor, one of the building's original structural engineers, who gives
good engineering reasons for attributing the collapse to several large
tanks of diesel fuel placed near the supporting trusses in violation of
fire codes. Notice that the NY
Times article gives specific numbers tied to specific facts; the C911
story consists only in vague and unsubstantiated innuendo. The simple fact
is, WTC7
was empty when it collapsed; it is a very different category of destruction
from the towers, which were specifically targeted for maximum loss of human
life. C911 has no credible case.

Col.Shaffer's testimony

It is claimed that Lt.Col.Anthony
Shaffer was silenced when trying to get someone in the government to
prevent the 9/11 attacks based on his intelligence gathering in operation
Able Danger. If you actually read the transcript
of his testimony before Congress, it's not hard to see that Shaffer
is a go-getter, and his superiors -- government workers all of them --
didn't like his activism showing up their incompetence. Anybody who has
worked in civil service knows what kind of people populate the government
agencies: Shaffer is the exception to the old saying that "there are two
ways to do something, the right way and the government way." We don't really
know if 9/11 could have been prevented if Able Danger had not been shut
down, we only know that after the fact, there was this face in the
list. Hey, we knew about Al-Qaeda before 9/11 too. That's different from
knowing time and place. It's important to look at the dates in Shaffer's
testimony: this all happened in 2000, long before the current administration
was elected. If Shaffer's testimony proves anything, it is that there was
no conspiracy tied to President Bush and his cronies.

6. Given that the acceleration of gravity is about 10m/s2,
calculate the terminal velocity of an object in free-fall for the distance
of three meters (the approximate height of one skyscraper floor).

7. Multiply this velocity times the mass (in tons) of the floor
falling that distance, to obtain the energy released when that concrete
stops on the next floor down, in millions of Joules.

8. Notice how much greater this is than the total energy in 10,000
gallons of jet fuel, the estimated amount in the airliner that hit the
tower. Now multiply this times 109 floors to get the energy released in
the tower falling only ten feet. Or else multiply the one floor times distance
it fell to the ground (264m from the 88th floor) to get the energy released
by that one floor landing on the ground. Notice that we have not yet added
in the mass of the structural steel; this is just the concrete.

9. Do the same calculations for one floor's worth of steel columns.
47 columns, times 3 meters in length, times 4m in girth, times an average
5cm thick (perhaps only 2cm on the 88th floor, but 10cm near the ground),
times the specific
gravity of iron, gives the total mass of the steel columns for one
floor (not including the trusses).

10. This next one is a little harder. Multiply the mass of concrete
in that one floor times the heat
of hydration in J/g, times the percentage of cement in the concrete,
to get the energy required to completely reduce the floor to powder. This
is significantly less than the total energy released by the falling mass.

11. I leave the next one as an exercise to the diligent: How many
billions
of Joules are left over to melt steel? How many Joules does it take to
melt a gram of iron/steel? Do the math. No explosives at all are needed,
once the tower starts to fall.

The Bottom Line

We have on the table a plausible account of how the two WTC towers collapsed,
involving 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers and two commercial airline planes flown
into the towers. Not all the details are known, but the personel requirements
and physics are credible. We also have the documented in-court admission
from the 20th hijacker that the story is essentially correct, and we have
a video of OBL taking uncoerced and gleeful responsibility for it. The
mechanics of the WTC7 collapse are irrelevant to this story, because it
was not one of the four targets.

We have not yet seen a coherent alternative explanation of how the two
towers collapsed, with credible personel requirements and physics. There
is no point in telling us the official explanation is fundamentally wrong
until we have a coherent alternative on the table, so we can evaluate their
relative merits objectively. The C911 crock is so full of holes, inconsistencies,
and flat-out lies, there is no way they can stick enough duct tape on it
to make it hold together and look believable -- and they know it, so they
don't even try. There is no valid reason to waste millions of dollars (which
could, in Shaffer's thinking, be better spent on body armor in Iraq) reopening
a closed investigation that has no feasible alternative.

With no coherent alternative, the official story -- despite whatever
its problems may be -- stands unchallenged.

Ask the C911 folks to work through the physics with you. They
will refuse. Ask them for a complete scenario; they have none. The proponents
of the C911 theory will not answer your questions. They have put together
a slick video to conceal the truth, and their argumentation basically consists
in insisting that you watch (and believe) the staged, photoshopped, and
animated propaganda job they spent so much money on. I try to encourage
people to do their own thinking and not buy into the images somebody else
fabricated. The C911 folks can't handle truth independently arrived at,
and my experience with one of them suggests they will do anything to prevent
anybody (including themselves) from seeing the real truth.

In every debate of any kind, people on either side present their best
arguments first. After they run out of substantive arguments, they resort
to ad hominem (insults). Be prepared: the C911 folks switch to ad hominem
very early; all you have to do is question their video dogma.

Does anybody out there really believe the C911 story? Are you willing
to discuss it intelligently with verifiable facts? Contact me (see below).
I'm willing to consider the possibility that there is something to this
story beyond the swiss cheese the guy who put me onto it was trying feed
to me, but insults only tell me you have nothing to say. If that's all
you have, please don't waste your time and mine.

Contact Me

Since posting this page, I have received numerous responses from people
with nothing original or worthwhile to say. If you are one of them, save
your time and mine. Otherwise, please preface your remarks with one
or more of the following evidences that I should read the rest of what
you have to say:

a. Do the math. Show me your calculations.

b. Be original. I'm not interested in links to more copycat C911
websites. Give me your own thinking, not merely evidence that you did no
thinking at all. My spam filter removes from my incoming email everything
with links to web pages.

c. Since this is obviously a political thing, show that you agree
with President Bush's politics -- such as your voter registration
stub showing you are registered Republican. Please note, I am registered
Independent, and I voted against Bush; I'm not defending Bush, I'm defending
innocent American citizens impugned by C911 sites.

If you supply one of these items and have something new to contribute,
Contact
me. Otherwise don't waste your time and mine.